5,000 Acres of Santa Fe Swamp Burning

The north central Florida fire that took off running Monday afternoon slowed down by Tuesday, but the work to contain it's flames --is far from over.

5,000 acres of dried out Santa Fe swampland are burning. Still some residents say they've seen worse-four years ago.

"It came all the way around the water- it just engulfed the whole street here," said Sondra Blake, a Bradford County resident who lives next to the swamp.

Much of what's grown back since the last time Santa Fe swamp burned in 2007, is on fire again.

"It's burning like it hasn't burned in 20 or 30 years," said Joey Williams, a Senior Forest Ranger in Suwannee County.

On Tuesday, bulldozers worked to freshen up containment lines around Santa Fe Swamp, keeping the fire inside. Unlike other wildfires, machines can't be driven straight to the flames, or else they'd sink.

"The ground in there is real spongy... once the equipment gets in there and starts breaking that top layer they have the tendency to go down and get stuck because you got a lot of mucky material in there," he said.

"The larger it gets- the more area of containment that we have to control, which you know--we have to bring in additional crews--- and right now in the state of Florida, we don't have the resources to go around--we're pretty hammered with wildfires," he said.

Since the fire started last Monday, two firefighters were treated last night for smoke inhalation. No homes have been evacuated.